


Somnia

by rallamajoop



Series: Waking World [2]
Category: Venom (Movie 2018), Venom - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Demons, Demonic Possession, Dreams and Nightmares, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:08:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25650058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rallamajoop/pseuds/rallamajoop
Summary: The bright, white light consuming Eddie’s vision shrinks into the end of a pen torch, shining into his left eye, then his right. An unfamiliar man in a blue shirt is peering into his face. Eddie blinks at a world still resolving into solid shapes and watches the man’s mouth move, meaningless and repetitive. His ears feel over-full; the universe murmurs at him in low ripples of noise. For a while, he becomes mesmerised by the flicker of red and blue lights cutting through the darkness over the man’s shoulder, the orange glow of spot fires still smouldering in the middle distance. Where is this?
Relationships: Eddie Brock/Venom Symbiote
Series: Waking World [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1859569
Comments: 19
Kudos: 49





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I still kind of like the idea of leaving [Waking World](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22630591) unexplained, but couldn't resist doing some more with demon!Venom. So what might otherwise amount to chapter 2 onwards gets posted as a separate story that you may take or leave as you prefer. 
> 
> I would say this is unlikely to make much sense if you haven't read _Waking World_ first - but realistically, at this point it may not make much more sense even if you _have_. The same warnings apply – though less because there's more to come than because this is all unavoidably set in the aftermath of part one.

The bright, white light consuming Eddie's vision shrinks into the end of a pen torch, shining into his left eye, then his right. An unfamiliar man in a blue shirt is peering into his face. Eddie blinks at a world still resolving into solid shapes and watches the man's mouth move, meaningless and repetitive. His ears feel over-full; the universe murmurs at him in low ripples of noise. For a while, he becomes mesmerised by the flicker of red and blue lights cutting through the darkness over the man's shoulder, the orange glow of spot fires still smouldering in the middle distance. Where is this?

Something, he thinks, is very wrong here. A flutter of movement somewhere just below his eyeline draws his eyes to the pair of hands, twitching faintly in his lap. He wonders who they belong to. 

There's a new noise, worrying at the periphery of his attention, and he's heard it at least twice before it occurs to him that it might be his name. 

" _Eddie_! Oh, thank god." A woman appears as if from nowhere, and Eddie is enfolded in a furious hug before he's entirely put together who this is, or which of them is which. _Anne_ , he thinks. _Annie_. Didn't they date once? 

But now Anne is leaning back, looking into his face with concern. "Eddie?" 

"Ma'am, he's in shock," the paramedic is saying, from somewhere behind her. "He hasn't even been able to tell us his name." 

"It's Eddie," Anne supplies. "Edward Brock. He's..." Eddie waits with baited breath for what she might say next, for what _he is_. To his disappointment, Anne looks sidelong at him, and stops. "He's been missing for more than 24 hours. When we heard about the explosion..." 

"Are you family?" 

"No. No, I'm... it's a long story." 

"Was he a patient at the Life Foundation?" 

"What? What, no. Not unless he's been improvising cover stories. He's a reporter. He was investigating _medical malpractice_ , for chrissakes. If he had anything to do with..." 

"Ma'am, he was found wandering the site in a hospital gown, dragging an IV. We don't have any idea what he's been given or why." 

Eddie tries to picture that. Apparently, his life—this _chapter_ of his life—didn't begin with waking up in the back of an ambulance with a pen light shining in his eyes. His mind conjures up the smell of smoke, the glowing heat of fire, the hard shapes of unseen debris under bare feet in the dark, lights and muffled voices interrupting the slow shuffle of progress... Had any of that really happened, or is he just imagining it might have? 

The back of his left hand throbs and stings. Was it doing that before? Did he just notice now? 

Someone says, " _Anne_." Eddie thinks it was probably him. 

"Jesus, Eddie." Anne takes his hands. "What were they doing to you?" 

Eddie thinks he'd like to know that too. 

"We need to get him to the hospital, get his bloodwork down to the lab." The medic is speaking again—no, it's his partner this time, a woman in a matching blue shirt. She's speaking to Anne. "Would you like to ride with us? There's no telling if he'll be up to identifying himself when we arrive." 

"Yeah, of course. Just..." Anne fumbles for her phone. "My partner's a doctor, he went to see if he could help, I just need to let him know..." 

She's still typing out her text when the shouting starts. Out in the red-and-blue-flickering darkness, three different EMTs are converging on a figure staggering clumsily across the field, still half-encased in a black body bag. Before anyone can reach the body-that-wasn't, the figure has lurched forward three more steps, and toppled forward to lie still once more. 

"Jesus Christ," says Eddie's paramedic, with feeling. His partner rubs her face and mutters something Eddie doesn't catch. Off in the distance, the EMTs have rolled the figure over and are checking its pulse. Still others are retracing the victim's steps to a row of black bags, now receiving new scrutiny. Eddie shivers. _Black_. Something about the colour, the sheen... 

"Oh my god," breathes Anne. "Are those _all_ bodies?" 

The medics exchange glances. "The good news is there don't seem to have been too many staff on-site when this place blew open," says the man. "They were still finding bodies in the facility ten minutes ago, but..." 

"But?" Anne prompts them. 

"I don't know if this helps, but they're saying most of them were dead long before the explosion tonight." 

Eddie finds himself being shepherded up and into the back of the ambulance, gentle hands tugging the blanket back over his shoulders, up and into place. 

" _Malpractice_ , huh?" says the woman. "Sounds like Eddie here might have been onto the story of a lifetime." 

Something nags at Eddie, as the dark world outside retreats behind the bright interior of the vehicle, the indefinable idea he's forgotten something. He's forgotten a lot of things, but this feels particular. He looks at Anne, helplessly. He's leaving with Anne, now. Is that wrong? He arrived with... who did he arrive with? 

Anne blinks, then turns sharply to the medic. "There was another doctor who worked here—Dora Skirth. She went missing the same time as Eddie—she may have been with him." 

The man shrugs apologetically. "Sorry. There are a lot of responders out there on the field tonight. If she's been found, she could be on her way to several different hospitals by now." 

Anne swallows and nods. The paramedics pull the ambulance doors closed. Eddie tries to remember if there'd been a woman called Dora Skirth with him before he was found. He doesn't think so. He wonders if he and Anne are still dating. His stomach churns. 

* * *

Later that night, Eddie opens his eyes to find himself lying on his knees and elbows in a narrow crevasse between two jagged walls of stone. He isn't afraid, he realises. This is a dream. He's been here before. His skin tingles with anticipation. Anticipation for _what_ he hasn't quite rationalised, but all he has to do is wait. He's sure of that. 

Presently, something touches his foot. Soft and slick, like the tip of a tongue, it freezes on contact, hesitating. Eddie holds his breath, worried, suddenly, that he'll give himself away. Worried that he's cheating, by knowing how this turns out. 

But before he's worried long, a strange tremor ripples through the ground beneath his body, a low, deep rumble that thrums through his fingertips—like the earth itself is _pleased_. 

**Here you are, Eddie,** he hears, as the tendril reawakens, spreading against his skin. 

Eddie breathes out, indescribably relieved. He's here. This is what he's here for. 

It's a kind of subtle torture, holding himself still as it follows the planes of his body over the underside of his knee, up his thigh, the bones of his hip, gliding across the muscles of his back and around and under his chest. He can feel the strength of it pooling around his centre of mass, shifting to take his weight as it lifts him, beginning to manoeuvre his body out of its blind tomb. 

It's been nothing but gentle, but there's something wrong here. He can't shake the feeling they've missed something getting to this point; this isn't how it happened, how it was _supposed_ to happen. He opens his mouth to complain, to explain, but the dark mass flows into it, over his tongue—it's lovely, there's a rightness to it—but it isn't what he... 

* * *

Eddie wakes with a start, blurry and confused, and spends his morning haunted by the memory of two radically different versions of the same twisted dream. 

Two hours, one lukewarm shower and a very bland hospital breakfast later, he's no closer to putting them out of his mind—or even deciding which version disturbed him more.


	2. Chapter 2

There's a hole in the wire mesh fence on the forest-side boundary of the Life Foundation complex, about three feet wide and at least six high—roughly the height of a man. Someone's strung a piece of bright yellow police tape across it, though the main effect is to make it easier for a would-be trespasser to spot amidst the greys and greens of its surroundings. It's an odd place for a hole, the lower edge hanging a couple of feet of feet above ground level, the wire edges pointing outwards, like something hit it at speed. Debris, maybe, from the explosion? That doesn't seem quite right.

It's taken Eddie at least twenty minutes to hike around the building from the main gate, where they wouldn't let him in. Had anyone pressed him on _why_ he was out here, he'd probably have muttered something about finding somewhere with a better angle on the damaged portions of the complex, but now he's come this far, this feels like exactly what he was looking for. 

Pulling himself up on the wire, Eddie awkwardly shrugs his way through the hole in the fence, one foot at a time, ducking under the police tape which pulls inwards and sags slightly behind him. It hasn't come loose, at least—having to balance on the solid foundations long enough to fix it behind him would only underline the absurdity of this whole situation. 

_This is foolish_ , he thinks. _What do you think you're doing here?_ But if he could answer that, he probably wouldn't be here at all, which is about the level everything's functioning at in Eddie's head today. 

Already feeling uncomfortably conspicuous, Eddie gives himself a moment to take stock of his new surroundings. 

Whereas the magnificent floating floors built into the side of the Marin Headlands make up the public face of the vast Life Foundation complex, _this_ is the unglamorous business-end of the facility, home to its laboratories and loading bays, and acre upon acre of imposing grey concrete. It must have been somewhere around here that Eddie was found last night, but nothing in view so much as twinges against his few, faint memories of dull shapes in the darkness, lit in red, orange, and blue. If not for the lingering smell of smoke, from here you wouldn't know the complex was damaged at all. 

The first visible testament to the events of the preceding night turns up a few dozen yards to the east of his entry point—a huge rolling door in the side of the building, opened halfway up and apparently stuck there. Inside, storage units the size of shipping containers and a forklift designed to the same scale cast ominous shadows in the limited light from the door. There's water on the floor, a large puddle over an inch deep, which Eddie becomes aware of only after he's stepped in it. Blackened marks on the far wall show up as darker smudges on grey in the dim light; the soot-chemical smell of the place says a fire was fought here. In all other respects, it's like walking into a cave. Eddie shivers, unsettled, and picks up his pace, one foot now squelching slightly and leaving a one-sided trail of damp footprints behind him. 

There's a keycard reader beside the door on the far wall, but the power is out and the door opens at a push. Some of the emergency lights are still working in the hallway beyond, which is fortunate—without windows, he's already left the sunlight far behind. As Eddie begins to pick his way through the unfolding maze of corridors, he finds little to suggest sunlight has ever penetrated so far into this place, with its sterile white walls, darkened in places with smoke and soot. 

Presently, an open doorway leads him into the first of a nest of laboratory spaces, fitted in glass and chrome—reflective surfaces that catch and bounce the little light around deceptively while leaving further corners steeped in gloom. Banks of electronic equipment lie silent and dark. Spaces like this should have been empty at the time of the incident in the dead of the night, but here and there, objects have been shoved off desks or chairs pushed over, as if left in a hasty exit. Eddie has soon stubbed one toe and nearly gone flying over a fallen lamp before he learns to take his steps more carefully. 

If he'd had any sense, he'd have brought a flashlight. Or he wouldn't be here at all. 

Precious little makes any lasting impression and Eddie has soon lost all sense of time or direction, drifting through the dark like a man in a dream. The Foundation is a maze of half-seen, interchangeable spaces; only occasionally does he encounter anything distinct enough to assure him he isn't wandering entirely in circles. One such case comes is a room lined with roll-out panels, like a hospital morgue. Elsewhere, a dead rabbit in a glass-walled cage, its small body limp and still. In another room again he finds a hospital gurney, tilted on an angle over a broken wheel. Its sides are fitted with thick, leather restraints, one of them hanging loose, as if torn. Eddie stares at it, then moves on. 

The gurney is some rooms behind him before the thought occurs that it might have been _him_ they'd put on it, strapped down with those restraints. The man from the ambulance had told Anne he was found dragging an IV, wandering the site in a hospital gown—almost the only clue Eddie has to explain waking up in a black fugue. He tries picturing himself lying there, the flat pressure of leather straps wrapped around his arms—white-coated scientists injecting him with something to wipe his mind of whatever dark secrets he'd stumbled onto here. But try as he might, the image slides through his memory without catching, alien and artificial. Another dead end. 

He wishes he knew what he was looking for. 

Eddie woke this morning to an indescribable feeling of violation—like he'd been scooped out of his own body and stuffed back in the wrong way up, so that nothing fits the way it used to. A stranger in his own life. Whatever did that, it happened here; there must be _something_ that can jog his memory, give him the context to understand those missing hours, but it's beginning to feel like a false hope. Nothing here is familiar. 

Rather than answers, he's found only a growing sense of unease, rising as the distance from the entrance spools out behind him. As if he's stepped into the gaping maw of some vast, sleeping beast, crawled down its throad into its twisted innards, like some fairy tale character hunting a lost pearl. Knowing with every step that any moment the beast might wake and crush him alive beneath its weight, without ever noticing he was there. 

Then, suddenly, he opens a door and finds himself blinded by sunlight. The room before him has been torn open across a vast, jagged triangle of wall and ceiling, so stark as to be almost unreal, like someone's ripped half a page out of a picture book to leave part of an illustration of a sinister, dark laboratory and another of a bright, sunny field cross-cut in the same space. As his eyes adjust, it dawns on Eddie that this must be the epicentre of last night's events, where the explosion carved a v-shaped gash into the complex. Here, scars from the fire have reduced a space a dozen yards across to a blackened crater—but above there is light and air at last. The Foundation's newly renovated layout opens directly onto a wide, green field, fading into the deeper grey-browns of the forest further out, under a gloriously blue sky. There are birds in it, some of them singing. 

After so long in the oppressive dark, the relief of light and colour is weakening in a way he'll probably be embarrassed about later. Perhaps the idea of this place as the belly of some vast beast really wasridiculous, in the (literal) light of day, but the beast is dead and vanquished either way, its guts split open in the sun. 

Perhaps that victory is all the closure he can hope for. 

Now that his eyes are adjusting to the light, Eddie can see that parts of the field are muddied with tire tracks in testament to last night's excitement. There's only a single, lone fire engine left today, but who knows how many emergency vehicles must have converged here last night. Not far away, a couple of vagrants in dusty clothes stare at him blankly until the awkwardness gets the better of Eddie and he looks away. So he can't even claim the title of the first trespasser to make it this far, though with a complex of this size and the security system in god knows what state, he supposes there must be a dozen different ways in by now—and out, hopefully. He's barely begun considering the serious question of how to get out of here when someone starts yelling at him. 

"Hey!" 

Eddie jumps, and turns to see a serious-looking, middle-aged woman in a high-vis vest rapidly heading his way. A man in similar attire isn't far behind her, ready to provide backup. 

"Where's your pass?" the woman barks at Eddie. Her own is pinned to the front of her vest; the still-barely-active journalist in Eddie notes that her name is Susanne Mertle of the Chemical Safety Board. 

Eddie doesn't have a pass, and this is obvious enough that Susanne doesn't waste time waiting for his answer. "Sir, this area is off limits to the public. Unless you're here with one of the official investigation teams, I'm going to have you escorted off the property." 

Eddie's been a journalist long enough that being asked to leave the premises is a familiar experience. There are a number of ways he could play this—the old 'freedom of the press' angle is a classic, but it rarely works. More realistically, he could try bluffing his way through by dropping some names of past contacts in the relevant departments who might have 'asked him to meet them on site'. Even dropping his own name has worked occasionally, if he's lucky enough to meet a fan. But Eddie's really in no state for most of that, so what comes out instead is shockingly honest. 

"I, uh... I was here. Last night? I think I was hit on the head or something? I came back to... I don't really remember much..." 

Incredibly, this seems to work—his accuser's face turns sympathetic. "Oh Jesus. I hear you, hon, but we can't have you wandering around. We're going to be picking through the rubble out here for days yet, and it's not safe." 

"I'm just... trying to understand what happened here, y'know?" Eddie offers, vaguely. At the back of his mind, a small, interested part of him is noting that playing the confused-survivor turns out to be a _very_ viable option for these situations, though nothing about this is an act today. 

"You and the rest of us," says Susanne, with feeling. "Take him to the front gate, will you, Stu? Make sure he doesn't _get lost_ on the way." The delivery of this last part underlines exactly how much rope the confused-survivor act has bought him: enough to avoid being arrested if he behaves himself on the way back, but not much more. 

'Stu' gives Eddie a suitably suspicious once over. "You don't need to see a medic, do you?" 

"Nah, they discharged me this morning. I, uh, came back." Now he has the breathing room for it, it strikes Eddie as terribly unfair that he's being escorted off the premises while those bums he saw a moment ago are allowed to wander around unmolested, but there's no-one anywhere near the overturned dumpster when he looks back again. Strange. 

"Alright, come on." Stu waves him in what is presumably the direction of the main gate, cutting short Eddie's remaining window for staring blankly out into the field wondering where the other trespassers went. He's not going to do himself any favours by mentioning disappearing people, but maybe they're just better at spotting trouble than Eddie is. Maybe... 

The thought is cut off by the shrill sound of a phone ringing, which is a real surprise considering that Eddie hadn't realised he was carrying one. Shooting a sheepish look at Stu, he finds the pocket it was hiding in and answers it. "Hello?" 

"Eddie?" It's Anne. "Where are you? We're at the hospital now, but they said you'd already checked out." 

"Um, yeah. They said I was good to go, so..." 

"Eddie, please tell me you're not doing what I think you're doing." 

Uh-oh. "Anne? I don't actually read minds, you know." 

" _Please_ tell me you aren't breaking back into the Life Foundation in the middle of a police investigation." 

"Uhh..." This is definitely not the moment to admit to Anne that he's in the process of being escorted off the premises as they speak. 

" _Jesus_ , Eddie." Anne's tone is even less interested in Eddie's excuses than Stu or Susanne. "Have you even looked at the news this morning? The Life Foundation's PR team have been working overtime on this—they're _already_ claiming the explosion was the result of sabotage, that someone snuck into the facility and set this up. They haven't named any names yet, but who do _you_ think they're going to pin this on?" 

It says a lot about the level of dissociation Eddie's wandering around in today that he genuinely has no idea where Anne's going with this until she says, " _You_ , Eddie." 

" _Me?_ Anne, I don't... I can't even _remember_ -" 

"But you had the motive, and you were _in the building_ when it happened. It's going to be child's play for the Foundation's lawyers to cast your amnesia as a convenient fiction for your own defence. Eddie, you are about to be the man at the centre of the whole investigation, and the last thing you need is accusations of having returned to the scene to _tamper_ with the _evidence_." 

Eddie exhales through his nose. Up ahead, Stu is politely pretending not to be listening in on the conversation as he leads them around the building, but it's a bit late now to worry about who might be hearing this conversation. "Anne," Eddie hisses, "they were piling body bags three-deep here last night. I remember that. You remember that, right?" 

"And their spokesmen are telling us those were _medical cadavers_ , acquired through the proper channels and part of a legitimate research project." 

"They can't..." 

"They _can_ , and they will, and that is why you need to get yourself out of there and back home _now_ before you make this any worse." 

Eddie looks upwards, to the cheerful blue of a sky which cares nothing for any of his spiralling personal problems. Perhaps he'd have been better off with fairy-tale monsters after all. "Anne, I... I _need_ to know what happened to me. That's why I came back." 

Anne sighs. "I know, Eddie. You're not wrong, but this isn't the way. Call me when you're home, okay?" 

"Okay," Eddie finishes, miserably, and Anne hangs up. He shoots another apologetic look at Stu, who seems bemused to have just witnessed Eddie getting a well-deserved chewing out from his girlfriend. He isn't far wrong, but there is absolutely nothing to be gained in explaining that that was only Eddie's _ex_ , who is definitely not getting back together with him for reasons even _that_ sorry performance couldn't much exacerbate at this point. As so well demonstrated by the _original_ Life Foundation incident, Eddie's ability to navigate legal quagmires is limited at the best of times, and today he can't even begin to process Anne's message. What she'd described feels like a problem from someone else's life, more than he can connect with emotionally on any conceivable level. 

He needs to find out what happened in those missing hours. Surely then all these other problems will evaporate, right? 

Well, thanks to Anne's call, he's missed most of his last chance to look around on the way back to the main gate, which is somewhat less busy now than it had been when he was here earlier. Only a handful of hopefuls are still trying to gain entry now: a couple of men in hard-hats and the ubiquitous high-vis gear are pinning name passes to themselves, and a slightly haggard-looking woman is arguing with the same man who'd denied Eddie entry earlier, presumably about to achieve much the same result Eddie had. He wonders if he should tell her not to bother. 

Another woman with a clipboard, younger than Susanne but cast much from the same mould, is _most_ displeased with whatever Stu has told her to explain Eddie, and wants both his name and photo ID for the record. Enough of Anne's message has sunk in with Eddie for this to ring alarm bells, and he's desperately trying to guess whether claiming not to have ID handy and giving a fake name is likely to bring _less_ or _more_ trouble later—when the outburst claims everyone's attention. 

" _You_!" 

Eddie looks around, startled. It's the woman who'd been trying to gain entry, her weatherworn face turned toward him, one arm raised, pointing at Eddie in accusation. This is so confusing that he actually looks behind himself for who else she could possibly mean. 

"You— _you_ took him!" she breathes, apropos of nothing that makes the least sense to Eddie. Around and between them, people are turning to stare. "How _dare_ you," she accuses him, eyes wide with misery and betrayal. "Give him back to me!" 

With this as her battle cry, she launches herself at him. A security guard moves to intercept her but she slips out of his grasp, and then she's on Eddie, fingers tangled in the front of his shirt, shaking him furiously as she shrieks, "Give him back! Give him _back_ to me!" 

It takes two security guards to drag her off him and away. While the madwoman is restrained, Eddie is hustled rapidly out of the building in something akin to a fugue state. His next clear memory finds him sitting in the back of an Uber, the Life Foundation and all its mysteries already fading in the rear-view mirror. 

It's only then that it finally dawns on Eddie that he'd recognisedthe anguished features of that madwoman: that was _Maria_. Maria, who sits on the sidewalk outside Mrs. Chen's bodega, charming change off passers-by, singing to keep herself company, stealing free papers from the box to line her blankets when the nights grow cold. Maria, who inspires so many calls to emergency services as an 'unconscious woman' on the street when she sleeps rough that several of the local paramedics know her by name—but no-one had been around to call anyone for her on that awful night she'd spent curled around a basin on the floor of a public restroom, moaning in misery while she miscarried a horrific mess of a half-formed nothing she'd barely known she was carrying until that moment... 

Eddie starts like a man awakening from a nightmare. How could he _possibly_ know that about Maria? When... _why_ would she have told him something like that? She's never told anyone about it, he's suddenly sure. 

Does he even know Maria at all? 

Hands shaking, Eddie blinks furiously, stares out the window into the middle distance, and tells himself he's not crying, those aren't tears pooling at the corners of his eyes, and that he's just shaken from... from whatever the hell that was back at the desk on his way out of the Foundation. He's missing one day of his life, not his name and identity. He'll figure this out. He'll be fine. 

He isn't in any state to be very convincing, unfortunately. 

_You knew it was a mistake to go back there_ , he thinks. At least, someone thinks it. 

Logically, it must have been him. 

* * *

That night, Eddie dreams that he's floating, far above his own body, lying naked and unconscious in an infinite black void. 

Should that be strange? After the last twenty-four hours, dreaming of something so widely understood as an out-of-body experience seems positively mundane. 

As he watches, Eddie realises there's something there, standing in void beside his body—barely visible as a different shade of black-on-black with a faint, oily sheen. It's Venom: looking down at him, then up. With a jolt, Eddie realises that _both_ his aspects are equally visible to those huge, pale eyes. 

**Look, Eddie!** Venom grins, his mouth stretched obscenely wide. **I have found your body.**

That's right, Eddie thinks, they were looking for it, weren't they? They were... but he can't put his finger on _why_. He supposes this must be good, but he isn't sure how it helps them. He has no idea how he's supposed to get back down there, only that the sight of Venom's imposing bulk standing over his own helpless form sends a quicksilver shiver through him—or through whatever part of him _this_ is, up here, feeling. 

Venom has turned his attention back to the body at his feet, opening his mouth to unroll a long, agile tongue. When the tip brushes across his lips, Eddie gasps—even floating a dozen feet above himself, he'd _felt_ that, and felt it intimately—the warm, slick texture on his sensitised skin, as Venom trails his tongue beneath his jaw and down his neck, exploring his chest with relish. Were Eddie in his body now, he'd be panting. 

Below, Venom leans in closer, so that he can apply more of that shockingly prehensile tongue to Eddie's body at once, making himself at home with all the softest places on his body, his neck, the ticklish insides of his wrists, arms, the creases of his thighs... The scene exerts a magnetic pull that seems to have Eddie drifting lower, closer, so that now he can make out the slick trails of saliva Venom's tongue leaves in its wake. 

Is that the point—is this how Venom means to reunite him with his body? If he enters his body now, will he open his eyes to see Venom looming over him, or will he be trapped there: home, but unable to move or see, only to feel? 

_**Mmm**_ **,** Venom hums, with such visceral pleasure that Eddie has to wonder who this is really _for_. If either of them really cares at this point. 

He can see himself—see his body—getting _hard_ —this is like getting off under a mirror, intimately obscene. He can _feel_ it too—that unrivalled intensity of sensation that comes with being unable to move, unable to do anything but feel, watch, and _want._ But Venom is in no hurry, as his tongue trails lower, closer. As if to taste every inch of him before it reaches what he longs to savour most... 

* * *

He wakes up hard, in his own body, in his own bed, his mouth dry and his pulse hammering. The clock on his nightstand says 3:15 AM when he gropes beside it for a glass of water, but only succeeds in knocking it onto the floor. Even so, it's an incalculable relief just to find himself able to move his own hands; touch his own face. 

Eventually, he manages to get back to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me [on tumblr](http://rallamajoop.tumblr.com/)


End file.
